Traverse comes to Edinburgh's rescue

In the midst of a disappointing festival, theatre critic Charles Spencer knows where to go for a shot of quality drama - not to mention bargain-price whisky

12:00AM BST 24 Aug 1996

AS FAR as theatre goes, it's been a lousy official Festival so far. The score in Edinburgh as the second week draws to a close is two shows cancelled (Elsinore and The Seven Sacraments of Nicolas Poussin) and two dismal flops (the inane agitprop of A Satire of the Four Estaites and the cold, self-regarding artifice of Robert Wilson's Orlando, starring Miranda Richardson.)

Meanwhile on the fringe, there is a distinct impression of déjà vu, the perennial feeling that the pushy comedians have colonised the event and turned new plays into an endangered species. Almost everyone seems to agree that this is one of the dullest festivals in years, and certainly not the great artistic celebration that ought to be marking Edinburgh's fiftieth year as a festival city.

But, as always, there is one refuge for both the jaded critic and the weary punter, one venue which can be relied upon to set the theatrical pulse racing. I refer of course to the Traverse.

With 646 companies offering 1,300 shows on the Fringe, you might have thought the only place where the drama critics could be glimpsed en masse would be at the official festival's press nights. Not true. Turning up at the Traverse one morning, I found almost all my colleagues installed for the same show, as if this were a West End première that happened to be taking place at 11am in a city several hundred miles to the north of our usual stamping grounds.

It's hard to define what makes some theatres special and others a penance to visit. Of course the quality of work has a huge amount to do with it, but the atmosphere is equally important. And the Traverse has always had a special buzz of energy.

The theatre was founded in 1963 by Jim Haynes, a seminal figure of the swinging Sixties who later went on to found the legendary Arts Lab in Drury Lane. It was Britain's first studio theatre, at the cutting edge of new work, and occupied a former brothel off the High Street. In 1969 it moved to what was once a sailmaker's workshop in the Grassmarkert. It was a cramped, ramshackle, splendidly atmospheric venue which squeezed an amazing amount of high quality work into two small spaces.

It has also become the bar for le tout Edinburgh

The big challenge came in 1992 when the theatre moved into swanky new premises beneath an office building. The property developers paid £11 million to create the shell of the theatre, which descends three storeys below ground level and involved blasting out some of the volcanic rock on which Edinburgh Castle proudly sits. Then the local council spent £3.4 million on fitting it out.

But theatres have a mysterious magic of their own: new premises can sometimes kill the very thing thing that made a company special in the first place.

Not at the Traverse. It has been designed with immense care and panache, and is without doubt one of the finest theatre buildings in Britain. The style is spare and chicly modern, and though the two auditoria are intimate, the rest of the building is at once spacious and welcoming.

Ian Brown, the Traverse's admirable artistic director for the past eight years (he leaves at the end of the present Fetival) says that even when the theatre was just a basic shell, it felt right, it felt theatrical. "When we were designing this building we also spent almost as much time on the bar as the auditoriums. If we were going to survive we had to get the bar right."

It's not just that the bar provides much needed revenue for a theatre faced with standstill grants from the Scottish Arts Council and a cut from the local authority following reorganisation. It has also become the bar for le tout Edinburgh, and you are as likely to findsharp suited businessmen there as Edinburgh's arts and media mob.

"The challenge," says Philip Howard, associate director for the past three years and about to take over as the new artistic director, "is getting the bar crowd into the theatre."

But the move from booze and lively conversation to drama is almost always worth making. Brown's track record over the past eight years has been superb. John Clifford's Ines de Castro, Simon Donald's The Life of Stuff, Tom Courtenay in Moscow Stations, and Sue Glover's beautiful and haunting agricultural play Bondagers are just a few of many shows that linger resonantly in the memory.

The good news is that standards are likely to remain as high as ever under Philip Howard, who has a passionate commitment to new work. He believes that Scottish drama is in the midst of a "golden age" and lists a tremendous number of promising new playwrights.

The best Scottish dramatists all focus on the personal, on sharply drawn characters, often combining wild quirky humour with a sense of the gritty bleakness of contemporay urban life

HE IS impatient with "director's theatre" in which flashy whiz kids make their names with splashy productions of the classics. "I think we're all getting a bit fed up with that, it's too easy to do and it is far harder to do new work well. I really believe in the centrality of the writer. If you put any writer and any director into a room, the likelihood is that the writer's vision is going to be more interesting than the director's. I can't get away from the feeling that directing is slightly parasitic."

He believes that the present strength of Scottish drama, with so many young writers opting for the theatre rather than film, television or novels, is partly to do with the movement towards constitutional change, as well as a sassy sense of streetwise confidence. The work is worlds removed from the bad old days of agit-prop. The best Scottish dramatists all focus on the personal, on sharply drawn characters, often combining wild quirky humour with a sense of the gritty bleakness of contemporay urban life and sudden glimpses of the spiritual and the redemptive.

And as the present magnificent production of Chris Hannan's Shining Souls demonstrates, Scotland is also superbly blessed with strong, marvellously individual actors.

The Traverse is of course far less busy outside the Festival (when it stages 10 shows a day) and Brown admits that he has had to reject good plays because he lacked the money to stage them. There is no doubt however, that the theatre is on a tremendous roll, easily up there with London's Royal Court and the Bush in the present spectacular renaissance of British playwriting talent.

Almost equally remarkable is the fact that the bar offers an excellent malt whisky at just £1 a shot. No wonder the Traverse is so popular - and so euphoric.